There’s something incredibly satisfying, if a little masochistic, about poring over PIC datasheets and manpages, and tinkering with low-level code you only half understand, when it all actually works and you get two devices to talk to each other (in this case a PIC16F886 and a Raspberry Pi, via I2C)

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Bret Victor:
How can you call the web a publishing medium when your bookshelf can just vanish? URLs and HTTP are a disaster. Doesn't have to be this way.

@worrydream “bookshelf” is completely the wrong mental model. A “list of links” is like a list of postal addresses of places (hence web “address”) as a physical analogy, or the contents of their authors brains as a human analogy. Complaining about their contents changing/disappearing is as complaining that space/time/humans are “a disaster” (which admittedly may broadly be true).

“your bookshelf” is whatever personal archives you make of your favourite things (analogies: photos, notes, physical books), and therefore the solution is better personal archival tools. I’ve made a start — my website automatically takes an archive of every page I link to and stores it as HTML+HTTP headers in the filesystem, which has proven to be a quite robust format.

Of course if you actually have a practical idea about how to improve on the infrastructure of the web, speak up and/or build it :)

Edit: reflecting on this, “completely the wrong mental model” is incorrect, and better expressed as “a mental model which is inconsistent with reality”. There are no “wrong” mental models, only a variety of co-existing metaphors with varying levels and areas of consistency with reality.

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Ben Werdmüller:
21st century politician to watch: @stellacreasy (whose icon is her dressed as Boba Fett), v actively engaging on social media. The future.

.@benwerd talked to any politicians about Known? I realised recently that politics is, broadly speaking, the battle for ideas, fought with language on the field of mass media. I’d much rather the field was platforms which belonged to citizens, rather than states or corporations. Social media is a start, but #indieweb principals can go much further.

Reading Lakoff+Johnson on time metaphors, wondering if the way we use the two main inconsistent metaphors (time as objects passing by a stationary observer vs time as a landscape through which an observer passes) has personality side effects, as one is a metaphor where the observer is helpless, whereas in the other the observer is in control.

The things which have always inspired me the most to create have always been tools and reference rather than exemplar examples elevated on pedestals. Want to inspire people? Build tools and documentation.

Got stuck for inspiration (trees are cliché and, in the UK, ironically associated with the conservatives) so looked on wikipedia, and found this beautiful photo by Stephen Ausmus:

So made a stylised version for a laugh, and actually really like it. It shares some colours with the indiwebcamp logo

whilst remaining stylistically separate and visualises a lot of #indieweb principals: a centralised node split up into a more diverse ecosystem, but still connected by the green strands of standards (many of which are #microformats, also associated with the colour green).

Kitchen disaster strikes! It turns out that the low melting point of chocolate in the mixture causes it to melt and flow out of the batter whilst frying, resulting in some vaguely chocolatey batter shells and guilty-looking chocolatey oil.

Paying more attention to the second batch results in some passable fried chocolate milk. Looks like success here is a matter of very thick filling and precise frying timing.